A Burnt-Out Case

  "You are like so many critics. You want me to write your own sort of story."

  "Have you read Manon Lescaut?"

  "Years ago."

  "We all loved it at the convent. Of course it was strictly forbidden. It was passed from hand to hand, and I pasted the cover of M. Lejeune's History of the Wars of Religion on it. I have it still."

  "You must let me finish my story."

  "Oh well," she said with resignation, leaning back against the pillows, "if you must."

  "I have told you about my hero's first discovery. His second came much later when he realised that he was not born to be an artist at all: only a very clever jeweller. He made one gold jewel in the shape of an ostrich egg: it was all enamel and gold and when you opened it you found inside a little gold figure sitting at a table and a little gold and enamel egg on the table, and when you opened that there was a little figure sitting at a table and a little gold and enamel egg and when you opened that... I needn't go on. Everyone said he was a master-technician, but he was highly praised too for the seriousness of his subject-matter because on the top of each egg there was a gold cross set with clips of precious stones in honour of the King. The trouble was that he wore himself out with the ingenuity of his design, and suddenly when he was making the contents of the final egg with an optic glass—that was what they called magnifying glasses in the old days in which this story is set, for of course it contains no reference to our time and no likeness to any living character..." He took another long drink of whisky; he couldn't remember how long it was since he had experienced the odd elation he was feeling now. He said, "What am I saying? I think I am a little drunk. The whisky doesn't usually affect me in this way."

  "Something about an egg," her sleepy voice replied from under the sheet.

  "Oh yes, the second discovery." It was, he began to think, a sad story, so that it was hard to understand this sense of freedom and release, like that of a prisoner who at last "comes clean," admitting everything to his inquisitor. Was this the reward perhaps which came sometimes to a writer? 'I have told all: you can hang me now.' "What did you say?"

  "The last egg."

  "Oh yes, that was it. Suddenly our hero realised how bored he was—he never wanted to turn his hand any more to mounting any jewel at all. He was finished with his profession—he had come to an end of it. Nothing could ever be so ingenious as what he had done already, or more useless, and he could never hear any praise higher than what he had received. He knew what the damned fools could do with their praise."

  "So what?"

  "He went to a house number 49 in a street called the rue des Remparts where his mistress had kept an apartment ever since she left her husband. Her name was Marie like yours. There was a crowd outside. He found the doctor and the police there because an hour before she had killed herself."

  "How ghastly."

  "Not for him. A long time ago he had got to the end of pleasure just as now he had got to the end of work, although it is true he went on practising pleasure like a retired dancer continues to rehearse daily at the bar, because he has spent all his mornings that way and it never occurs to him to stop. So our hero felt only relief: the bar had been broken, he wouldn't bother, he thought, to obtain another. Although, of course, after a month or two he did. However it was too late then—the morning habit had been broken and he never took it up again with quite the same zeal."

  "It's a very unpleasant fairy-story," the voice said. He couldn't see her face because the sheet was pulled over it. He paid no attention to her criticism.

  "I tell you it isn't easy leaving a profession any more than you would find it easy leaving a husband. In both cases people talk a lot to you about duty. People came to him to demand eggs with crosses (it was his duty to the King and the King's followers). It almost seemed from the fuss they made that no one else was capable of making eggs or crosses. To try and discourage them and show them how his mind had changed, he did cut a few more stones as frivolously as he knew how, exquisite little toads for women to wear in their navels—navel-jewels became quite a fashion for a time. He even fashioned little soft golden coats of mail, with one hollow stone like a knowing eye at the top, with which men might clothe their special parts—they came to be known for some reason as Letters of Marque and for a while they too were quite fashionable as gifts. (You know how difficult it is for a woman to find anything to give a man at Christmas.) So our hero received yet more money and praise, but what vexed him most was that even these trifles were now regarded as seriously as his eggs and crosses had been. He was the King's jeweller and nothing could alter that. People declared that he was a moralist and that these were serious satires on the age—in the end the idea rather spoilt the sale of the letters, as you can imagine. A man hardly wants to wear a moral satire in that place, and women were chary of touching a moral satire in the way they had liked touching a soft jewelled responsive coat.

  "However the fact that his jewels ceased to be popular with people in general only made him more popular with the connoisseurs who distrust popular success. They began to write books about his art; especially those who claimed to know and love the King wrote about him. The books all said much the same thing, and when our hero had read one he had read them all. There was nearly always a chapter called The Toad in the Hole: the Art of Fallen Man, or else there was one called From Easter Egg to Letters of Marque, the Jeweller of Original Sin."

  "Why do you keep on calling him a jeweller?" the voice said from under the sheet. "You know very well he was an architect."

  "I warned you not to attach real characters to my story. You'll be identifying yourself with the other Marie next. Although, thank God, you're not the kind to kill yourself."

  "You'd be surprised what I could do," she said. "Your story isn't a bit like Manon Lescaut, but it's pretty miserable all the same."

  "What none of these people knew was that one day our hero had made a startling discovery—he no longer believed all those arguments historical, philosophical, logical, and etymological that he had worked out for the existence of the King. There was left only a memory of the King who had lived in his parents' heart and not in any particular place. Unfortunately his heart was not the same as the one his parents shared: it was calloused with pride and success, and it had learned to beat only with pride when a building..."

  "You said building."

  "When a jewel was completed or when a woman cried under him, 'donne, donne, donne'." He looked at the whisky in the bottle: it wasn't worth preserving the little that remained; he emptied it into his glass and he didn't bother to add water.

  "You know," he said, "he had deceived himself, just as much as he had deceived the others. He had believed quite sincerely that when he loved his work he was loving the King and that when he made love to a woman he was at least imitating in a faulty way the King's love for his people. The King after all had so loved the world that he had sent a bull and a shower of gold and a son..."

  "You are getting it all confused," the girl said.

  "But when he discovered there was no such King as the one he had believed in, he realised too that anything that he had ever done must have been done for love of himself.

  How could there be any point any longer in making jewels or making love for his own solitary pleasure? Perhaps he had reached the end of his sex and the end of his vocation before he made his discovery about the King or perhaps that discovery brought about the end of everything? I wouldn't know, but I'm told that there were moments when he wondered if his unbelief were not after all a final and conclusive proof of the King's existence. This total vacancy might be his punishment for the rules he had wilfully broken. It was even possible that this was what people meant by pain. The problem was complicated to the point of absurdity, and he began to envy his parents' simple and uncomplex heart, in which they had always believed that the King lived—and not in the cold palace as big as St. Peter's a hundred miles away."

  "So then?"

  "I told you,
didn't I, that it's just as difficult to leave a profession as to leave a husband. If you left your husband there would be acres and acres of daylight you wouldn't know how to cross, and acres of darkness as well, and of course there would always be telephone calls and the kind enquiries of friends and the chance paragraphs in the newspapers. But that part of the story has no real interest."

  "So he took an air-credit card..." she said.

  The whisky was finished and the equatorial day broke outside the window like something smashed suddenly on the curb of the sky, flowing in a stream of pale green and pale yellow and flamingo pink along the horizon, leaving it afterwards just the plain grey colour of any other Thursday. He said, "I've kept you awake all night."

  "I wish you'd told me a romantic story. All the same it took my mind off things." She giggled under the sheet. "I could almost say to him, couldn't I, that we'd spent the night together. Do you think that he'd divorce me? I suppose not. The Church won't allow divorce. The Church says, the Church orders..."

  "Are you really so unhappy?" He got no reply. To the young sleep comes as quickly as day to the tropical town. He opened the door very quietly and went out into the passage that was still half dark with one all-night globe palely burning. Some late-sleeper or early-riser closed a door five rooms away: a flush choked and swallowed in the silence. He sat on his bed and the light grew around him—it was the hour of coolness. He thought: the King is dead, long live the King. Perhaps he had found here a country and a life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I

  Querry was out early to do as many as he could of the doctor's errands before the day became too hot. There was no sign of Marie Rycker at breakfast, and no sound over the partition of their rooms. At the Cathedral he collected the letters which had been waiting for the next boat—he was glad to find that not one of them was addressed to him. Toute a toi had made her one gesture towards his unknown region, and he hoped for her sake that it had been a gesture of duty and convention and not of love, for in that case his silence would do her no further hurt.

  By midday he was feeling parched, and finding himself not far from the wharf he went down to the river and up the gang-plank of the Bishop's boat to see whether the captain were on board. He hesitated a moment at the foot of the ladder, surprised by his own action. It was the first time for a long while that he had voluntarily made a move towards companionship. He remembered how fearful he had been when he last set foot on board and the light was burning in the cabin. The crew had piled logs on the pontoons ready for another voyage, and a woman was hanging her washing between the companion-way and the boiler; he called "Captain," as he climbed the ladder, but the priest who sat at the saloon table going through the bills of lading was a stranger to him.

  "May I come in?"

  "I think I know who you are. You must be M. Querry. Shall we open a bottle of beer?"

  Querry asked after the former captain. "He has been sent to teach moral theology," his successor said, "at Wakanga."

  "Was he sorry to go?"

  "He was delighted. The river-life did not appeal to him."

  "To you it does?"

  "I don't know yet. This is my first voyage. It is a change from canon law. We start tomorrow."

  "To the leproserie?"

  "We shall end there. A week. Ten days. I'm not sure yet about the cargo."

  Querry when he left the boat felt that he had aroused no curiosity. The captain had not even asked him about the new hospital. Perhaps Paris-Dimanche had done its worst; there was nothing more that Rycker or Parkinson could inflict on him. It was as though he were on the verge of acceptance into a new country; like a refugee he watched the consul lift his pen to fill in the final details of his visa. But the refugee remains apprehensive to the last; he has had too many experiences of the sudden afterthought, the fresh question of requirement, the strange official who comes into the room carrying another file. A man was in the hotel-bar, drinking below the man in the moon and the chains of mauve paper; it was Parkinson.

  Parkinson raised a glass of pink gin and said, "Have one on me."

  "I thought you had gone away, Parkinson."

  "Only as far as Stanleyville for the riots. Now I've filed my story and I'm a free man again until something turns up. What's yours?"

  "How long are you staying here?"

  "Until I get a cable from home. Your story has gone over well. They may want a third instalment."

  "You didn't use what I gave you."

  "It wasn't family reading."

  "You can get no more from me."

  "You'd be surprised," Parkinson said, "what sometimes comes one's way by pure good luck." He chinked the ice against the side of his glass. "Quite a success that first article had. Full syndication, even the Antipodes—except of course behind the curtain. The Americans are lapping it up. Religion and an anti-colonialist angle—you couldn't have a better mixture for them. There's just one thing I do rather regret—you never took that photograph of me carried ashore with fever. I had to make do with a photograph which Mme. Rycker took. But now I've got a fine one of myself in Stanleyville, beside a burnt-out car. Wasn't it you who contradicted me about Stanley? He must have been there or they wouldn't have called the place after him. Where are you going?"

  "To my room."

  "Oh yes, you are number six, aren't you, in my corridor?"

  "Number seven."

  Parkinson stirred the ice round with his finger. "Oh, I see. Number seven. You aren't vexed with me, are you? I assure you those angry words the other day, they didn't mean a thing. It was just a way to get you talking. A man like me can't afford to be angry. The darts the picador sticks into the bull are not the real thing."

  "What is?"

  "The next instalment. Wait till you read it."

  "I hardly expect to find the moment of truth."

  "Touché," Parkinson said. "It's a funny thing about metaphors—they never really follow through. Perhaps you won't believe me, but there was a time when I was interested in style." He looked into his glass of gin as though into a well. "What the hell of a long life it is, isn't it?"

  "The other day you seemed afraid to lose it."

  "It's all I've got," Parkinson said.

  The door opened from the blinding street and Marie Rycker walked in. Parkinson said in a jovial voice, "Well, fancy, look who's here."

  "I gave Mme. Rycker a lift from the plantation."

  "Another gin," Parkinson said to the barman.

  "I do not drink gin," Marie Rycker told him in her stilted phrase-book English.

  "What do you drink? Now that I come to think of it, I don't remember ever seeing you with a glass in your hand all the time I stayed with you. Have an orange pressée, my child?"

  "I am very fond of whisky," Marie Rycker said with pride.

  "Good for you. You are growing up fast." He went down the length of the bar to give the order and on his way he made a little jump, agile in so fat a man, and set the paper-chains rocking with the palm of his hand.

  "Any news?" Querry asked.

  "He can't tell me—not until the day-after-tomorrow. He thinks..."

  "Yes."

  "He thinks I'm caught," she said gloomily and then Parkinson was back beside them holding the glass. He said, "I heard your old man had the fever."

  "Don't I know what it feels like!" Parkinson said. "He's lucky to have a young wife to look after him."

  "He does not need me for a nurse."

  "Are you staying here long?"

  "I do not know. Two days perhaps."

  "Time for a meal with me then?"

  "Oh no. No time for that," she said without hesitation.

  He grinned without mirth. "Touché again."

  When she had drained her whisky she said to Querry, "We're lunching together, aren't we, you and I? Give me just a minute for a wash. I'll fetch my key."

  "Allow me," Parkinson said, and before she had time to protest, he was already back at the bar, swinging her key on his
little finger. "Number six," he said, "so we are all three on the same floor."

  Querry said, "I'll come up with you."

  She looked into her room and came quickly back to his. She asked, "Can I come in? You can't think how squalid it is in mine. I got up too late and they haven't made the bed." She wiped her face with his towel, then looked ruefully at the marks which her powder had left. "I'm sorry. What a mess I've made. I didn't mean to."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Women are disgusting, aren't they?"

  "In a long life I haven't found them so."

  "See what I've landed you with now. Twenty-four more hours in a hole like this."

  "Can't the doctor write to you about the result?"

  "I can't go back until I know. Don't you see how impossible that would be? If the answer's yes, I've got to tell him right away. It was my only excuse for coming anyway."

  "And if the answer's no?"

  "I'll be so happy then I won't care about anything. Perhaps I won't even go back." She asked him, "What is a rabbit test?"

  "I don't know exactly. I believe they take your urine, and cut the rabbit open..."

  "Do they do that?" she asked with horror.

  "They sew the rabbit up again. I think it survives for another test."

  "I wonder why we all have to know the worst so quickly. At a poor beast's expense."

  "Haven't you any wish at all for a child?"

  "For a young Rycker? No." She took the comb out of his brush and without examining it pushed it through her hair. "I didn't trap you into lunch, did I? You weren't eating with anyone else?"

  "No."

  "It's just that I can't stand that man out there."

  But it was impossible to get far away from him in Luc. There were only two restaurants in the town and they chose the same one. The three of them were the only people there; he watched them between bites from his table by the door. He had slung his Rolleiflex on the chair-back beside him much as civilians slung their revolvers in these uncertain days. At least you could say of him that he went hunting with a camera only.